Sunday Morning Vinyl

Record: Chico Hamilton Quintet
Artist: Chico Hamilton Quintet
Released: Pacific Jazz Records, 1956

The Chico Hamilton Quintet is different, and it's immediately clear why this was one of my father's favorites. Hamilton was born and raised in Los Angeles, and he became one of the pioneers of a more relaxed style sometimes referred to as cool jazz, or even West Coast jazz.

I'm guessing there wasn't an East Coast-West Coast rivalry like Biggie and Pac, but things are different out here, even now. Back then? California might well have been an island floating in the Pacific Ocean.

Several years ago I had the opportunity to interview sportswriter Arnold Hano who had been born and raised in the Bronx before eventually moving out west to California, where he continued writing in the 1950s and '60s. (Here's the full interview: Part I/Part II.)We talked about how the West was viewed back then.

Hano:  When I was back in New York I did whatever was around there. But when I was on the west coast, you know, that’s an insular attitude. I was sent from Laguna Beach to Seattle to cover a basketball scandal at Seattle University!

Waddles:  Because it’s the west coast, it’s all the west coast.

Hano:  “Oh, Hano’s out there. He’s on the west coast, he can do that.” They would never send anybody from New York to Cleveland, but this is a greater distance, much greater distance. So yeah, you’re right. It was geographic. It was wonderful. 

I can only imagine that the geographic isolation of the time allowed for, or at least contributed to, the creation of a sound that was dramatically different from the big band and bepop styles percolating on the East Coast. What this record preserves is a form of jazz that sometimes includes elements of classical music, combining my father's two loves. (Had Sinatra showed up to sing a few bars, we'd have had the trifecta.)

The opening notes of the record come from Fred Katz's cello, bowed not plucked, instantly establishing the classical feel. The rest of that first side, recorded in a Hollywood studio with Hamilton on the drums behind the rest of the quintet, certainly puts the cool in cool jazz, but I prefer side two. Not only is the style closer to the traditional jazz that I prefer, it was recorded live. In between tracks we hear polite applause from a small crowd, and during the songs, most noticeably during Carson Smith's bass solo on "Spectacular," we can hear the band members cackling with delight. The joy is palpable.

But here's the most interesting part. The live tracks were recorded at a nightclub called Harry Rubin's Strollers in Long Beach, California, just a short drive from my house. Some quick research gave me an address, but I wasn't surprised to find that there were no signs of a jazz club when I arrived on the scene. That stretch of the street has long since been closed to cars and renamed "Promenade" as part of the city's downtown revitalization project. As near as I can tell, the spot where the club must've stood is now occupied by the Renaissance Hotel.

It would've been nice to be able to walk into a darkened night club and imagine a scene from sixty-seven years ago, but instead I stood blinking in the California sun as bikers sped past and young couples pushed babies in strollers. It didn't matter. The connection was still there. On August 4, 1955, the Chico Hamilton Quintet recorded a few tracks in a long forgotten club in California. Not long after that my father bought the resulting record in Detroit and, judging by the wear and tear on the album jacket, came to love it. On a November afternoon in 2022, I brought the record back to where it had started. The circle was closed.

Side 1
A Nice Day
Funny Valentine
Blue Sands
The Sage
The Morning After

Side 2
I Want to Be Happy
Spectacular
Free Form
Walking Carson Blues
Buddy Boo

Record: Big New Herd at the Monterey Jazz Festival
Artist: Woody Herman
Released: Atlantic Records, 1960

For the second week in a row I'm writing about a live performance recorded at a jazz festival. Last week it was Duke Ellington at Newport, and this week it's Woody Herman at Monterey. The Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals are unquestionably the biggest and most storied music festivals in America, so it's no surprise that so many of the greats have released recordings of their performances at one event or the other, and also no surprise that so many of those recordings are in my father's collection.

There's essentially zero chance that I'll ever make it to Newport, Rhode Island, and even though it's possible that I could head up the coast one summer to Monterey, the event I'd truly love to check out is the Detroit Jazz Festival, held annually on Labor Day Weekend. I've even got a cousin who sometimes performs there, so there's really no excuse not to make the trip. Someday. 

But back to Woody and his band. Herman had taken to referring to his orchestra as a "herd" rather than a band, due in part to the fluidity of such groups. For this festival the herd included many of its usual members, but they also added a few guests from the nearby San Francisco Symphony. According to Ralph J. Gleason's liner notes, Herman remarked, "I wish I could take this band on the road!"

The result is some of the most listenable jazz you could ever find. It's not bland background music -- there's plenty of substance here -- but it isn't challenging. That's hardly a criticism. 

We choose our music with a purpose in mind, creating a soundtrack to fit the moment. In my early twenties, when I was regularly making the six hour drive between L.A. and the Bay Area, for example, I had a playlist of CDs designed to keep the energy up during an otherwise monotonous trek. Some genres work well as the background for a study session, while something else might fit for an evening with friends. 

There are even differences within genres. Charles Mingus demands your attention; Woody Herman says, "Don't mind us. We'll just be over here having fun if you want to listen." And it's the fun that shines through in this live recording. As one solo is passed to another, all the expected instruments have their moments -- a trumpet here, a saxophone there. But there's also Woody's clarinet as well as Vic Feldman's vibraharp, a warmer relative of the xylophone. Because it's a live performance -- and not just remixed versions of what was played that afternoon and evening in Monterey -- we can often hear the band members shouting encouragement to one another. (Gleason also writes that we can even hear a plane buzzing the crowd at various points, but I can't quite make that out.)

Gleason closes his notes by explaining that "Monterey was a gas for musicians and fans alike." We spend the time and money to go and see our favorite bands in concert precisely because "it's a gas." Cuing up the music and singing along at home to our favorite tracks is one thing, but being part of a crowd waiting for something unexpected to happen is something completely different.

Sometimes the venue matters. My wife and I went to see one of her favorite bands, the Shins, in a small club several years ago. There might've been five hundred people there, and the setting was so intimate that we could hear conversations between the bandmates between songs and comments from some of the superfans who predicted upcoming numbers based on which guitar the lead singer grabbed before heading back to the mic. I remember seeing the English Beat with a friend in an even smaller venue on the Sunset Strip; the crowd was so small that frontman Dave Wakeling opened the stage for any of the women, soccer moms all, to come up and dance as he played "Tenderness." 

But somehow that joy of the performance isn't lost when the venue gets larger, it only changes. There's nothing like the collective explosion as an arena crowd hears the opening chords of a favorite song or sings along with the chorus. I saw U2 at the Rose Bowl several years ago, and even though our seats were roughly 200 yards from the stage, there was still a connection as one hundred thousand of us shared our voices with Bono as we sang the songs we'd been singing alone in our cars for the past twenty-five years. It was magic.

There might not have been any dancing on the stage on October 3, 1959, in Monterey, but there's no doubt the crowd that afternoon and evening arrived with the same expectations of concert and festival goers anywhere. Perhaps that's why we see only Woody Herman's silhouette on an album cover that's dominated by the crowd, row upon row of fans that say something significant about the era. Many of the men are wearing dress shirts and ties, and a few are even in suit jackets. There are hats everywhere with a few programs serving as makeshift visors, and those who aren't wearing sunglasses are squinting into the sun. If it were Woodstock or Lollapalooza or Coachella there'd likely be a lot more skin showing, but on some level a festival is still a festival. 

The panorama of the crowd does bring up another issue that I've written about before. There might be two hundred faces in the photo, but only four of them appear to be Black. Granted, this was Monterey, California, and a picture like this taken in Chicago or New York or Detroit might've looked a bit different, but this was still 1959, a time when jazz musicians, both Black and white, were playing for predominantly white audiences like this one. So maybe this was more like Coachella than we might think.

Side 1
Four Brothers
Like Some Blues Man
Skoobeedoobee

Side 2
Monterey Apple Tree
Skylark
The Magpie

Record: Ellington at Newport
Artist: Duke Ellington
Released: Columbia Records, 1956

For the second time I find myself writing here about a Duke Ellington performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. The first time was Newport 1958, but this record was from two summers earlier, in 1956, a recording that many still see as one of the most important in Ellington's career.

Ellington's performing career spanned from the 1920s until his death in 1974 and included dozens and dozens (hundreds?) of recordings. He is, without question, not only one of the most important and most influential jazz musicians of all time, but one of the greatest American musicians of any genre. Given that, it should be no surprise that his work is well represented in my father's collection.

One way in which jazz differs from more modern genres of music is in the importance of performance. It isn't uncommon today for the most popular artists and bands to eschew touring altogether in the later stages of their careers even as they continue to produce new music in studio sessions. Some bands may develop reputations as being outstanding showmen, but even in those cases the studio work takes precedence. 

For many jazz performers, however, this wasn't the case. As the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival approached, Duke Ellington's career appeared to have been waning. It was his performance on July 7 -- not a stunning new studio album -- that revitalized his career and gave him the momentum to continue for another two decades. This record is ostensibly the documentation of that evening (which stretched into morning), and it eventually became the best selling album of Ellington's career.

Why was performance so important? Jazz is an ephemeral art form, due in part to the improvisational nature of the genre but also to the limitations of vinyl records. With only about twenty-two minutes available on one side, there often wasn't room for longer studio compositions or live performances that stretched beyond those limits. (As a result, the CD era saw an explosion of releases of older material that couldn't have been released in previous formats.)

As alluded to above, this recording isn't completely live as suggested. Columbia Records did indeed record Ellington and his band that evening, but there were problems. Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves apparently played into the wrong microphone for long stretches and was completely inaudible, for example, and some of the crowd noise we hear on the record is artificial.

But when you're discussing a landmark record like this there's no point in quibbling over details of perceived authenticity. George Avakian's rich liner notes ignore all of this and instead focus on the impact of the live performance. His description upends any image the reader might have of a jazz concert, more specifically a jazz audience, in 1956. 

The most important moment is preserved on side two during the fifteen-minute masterpiece "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," which featured a lengthy tenor sax solo by Gonsalves. Ellington had told him to blow as long as he felt like blowing, and the result was a near ten-minute solo that brought the house down. We imagine row upon row of dignified listeners, perhaps tapping their toes but nothing more. But reading Avakian's description of the night, it might've been closer to the Rolling Stones at Altamont, if not as tragic.

As Gonsalves continued to wail away, the energy in the audience began to build. "A platinum-blonde girl in a black dress began dancing in one of the boxes (the last place you'd expect that in Newport!) and," writes Avakian, "a moment later somebody else started in another part of the audience." (There's a photo of the blonde on the back of the album and although she was anonymous at the time of the album's release, she was eventually identified as Elaine Anderson. You can read more about her and her recollections of that night here.)

Those dancers, the energy of Gonsalves's long solo, the driving rhythm of Ellington's band, and, no doubt, the lateness of the hour all combined to bring much of the crowd to its feet. They filled the aisles and pushed closer to the stage, at points leading police and festival security to consider shutting the show down. But Ellington, perhaps sensing the magnitude of the moment, would have none of it. The record ends after "Diminuendo and Crescendo," but the band played on into the night. And Ellington played on for another twenty years, thanks to this performance.

Side 1
Festival Junction
Blues to Be There
Newport Up

Side 2
Jeep's Blues
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue

Record: Mingus Revisited
Artist: Charles Mingus
Released: Limelight Records, 1965

The cover of this record tells you everything you need to know. To steal a phrase from the modern parlance, back in the 1960s Charles Mingus was playing chess while everyone else played checkers. Look at him as he sits comfortably before the board, fingers intertwined, eyes closed as he contemplates his next move.

His move with this record was to be experimental, to push the boundaries of jazz forward. This was originally recorded in 1960 and released the following year by Mercury Records with the title Pre-Bird. (That title reflects the idea that Mingus hadn't yet listened to Charlie "Bird" Parker, who would become a great influence.) Producer Leonard Feather writes in the liner notes, "Unavailable for many years, it is herein reissued because of its historical importance."

It's important because it's unlike anything almost anyone else was doing at the time. John Coltrane and Miles Davis, both separately and together, would push jazz into challenging directions, but even they weren't doing what Mingus was. 

Mingus had already made his mark as a bassist, and now he was composing. Most of the tracks on this record are compositions of his own for a band that is big, if not a "big band." In addition to Mingus's bass, there are five trumpets, four trombones, six saxophones, three percussionists, a tuba, a flute, a cello, a piano, and even an oboe. Most of those unexpected instruments contribute to the Mingus originals, the final four tracks on side one, and the final two on the reverse. 

Mingus sets up an interesting contrast on each side as he begins with traditional tunes, including a tribute to one of his greatest influences, Duke Ellington (more on that coming), then finishes with his own songs which are anything but traditional. Mingus spoke often about his love of classical music and composers like Ravel and Debussy, and those influences are heard in these compositions which are jazz numbers, certainly, but are also orchestral in nature. 

On two songs he even enlists the services of a vocalist, Lorraine Cousins, uncredited except in Feather's notes, and her haunting vocals paired with the unorthodox feel of those tracks produce songs which are as unsettling as they are brilliant. I was listening to them one evening in the dining room when my phone pinged with a text from my wife who was writing in the adjacent office. 

"Do you mind using headphones? The music is kinda stressing me out... It sounds like a scary movie or something."

She wasn't wrong, and I'm guessing many listeners in 1961 (or 1965) must've had similar reactions. It's different, to say the least.

But let's go back to the opening tracks from each side. The record begins with "Take the 'A' Train," a Billy Strayhorn classic that I remember playing in middle school jazz band. Side two opens with an Ellington number, "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me."

It all seems fairly straight forward until you look deeper at the track listing and put the needle on the record. Each opening track is actually an interpolation of two songs. Mingus has overlapped two songs on one track. On side one that means in addition to "Take the 'A' Train," you're also listening to "Exactly Like You." Mingus's arrangement overlaps the two songs, with the melody from one on the left channel (in your left ear if you're using headphones) and the second melody on the right channel. It isn't just genius, it's mad-scientist-genius. And the best part? For listeners who aren't aware of what's going on, it's just a song.

Considering all this, Mingus Revisited isn't just a record. It's the preservation of a moment in time when an artist pushed the boundaries of his chosen medium. Like any artwork described as avant garde, it can be disconcerting at first listen, but after spinning it almost every day for the past week, I've come to appreciate the challenging sections as much as the melodic interludes. It's all fairly amazing.

Finally, there was a surprise. On the back of the album jacket in the upper righthand corner, a message is written with a blue ballpoint pen in my father's elegant handwriting: "Demo for Sylvia." I don't know who Sylvia was, nor do I need to know. Those three words trigger the imagination and conjure a scene of my father sharing this music with someone else. Music, after all, is meant to be shared.

Side 1
Take the "A" Train/Exactly Like You
Prayer for Passive Resistance
Eclipse
Mingus Fingus No. 2
Weird Nightmare

Side 2
Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me/I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart
Bemoanable Lady
Half-Mast Inhibition